Luke McCowan is Dundee's happy accident as Tony Docherty admits Hearts matchwinner wasn't meant to start

Tony Docherty has admitted goal hero Luke McCowan only started after he was wrongly included on the Dundee team lines.

It ended up being a masterstroke as the midfielder’s second half goal was enough to sink Hearts and hand the Dark Blues their first top-flight win on their Premiership return. Dundee had initially put out a team sheet that had McCowan in it and then realised it should have been Josh Mulligan. Referee Alan Muir refused to let them change it because it wasn’t an injury.

Docherty revealed: “There was something happened before the game. Human error you put it down to. But it just shows the strength of the squad because it was similar to the Motherwell game where we had Antonio Portales go off injured really early. We had to re-jig it there. That’s what I’m trying to build here so that regardless of anything that crops up we can deal with it.”

Hearts technical director Stevie Naismith insisted it was the officials and not Hearts who had stopped Dundee making the pre-match change. Naismith said: "Twenty minutes after the team sheets went in, someone said they wanted to change their team sheet.

“The ref said that only an injury can change it once they are in. I presume that's what happened.”

It was a big three points for Dundee and Docherty praised McCowan. He also knew he was capable of doing it, having scored from even further out in pre-season against Fleetwood Town.

Docherty added: “It doesn’t surprise me with Luke. He did it against Fleetwood in pre-season, actually from further out. At the time I’m telling him to pass but I remembered he’d done it before.

“He’s a good player and typifies the type of player we have here. I’m really pleased for him but more for the squad because they got their rewards for